This brilliant but neglected art form is under threat from 'real-life’ comedy

WS Gilbert was good at them (when asked what he thought of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s performance as Hamlet, he apparently replied: “Funny without being vulgar.”) Oscar Wilde was famous for them, and Shakespeare had his share (although he was no Bob Monkhouse). Bob Hope and Bing Crosby liked them so much that they paid their writers extra to come up with more and better examples.

The one-liner has a noble history, and even today it’s thriving: witness the just-published list of the “best” gags at the Edinburgh Fringe (Stewart Francis won with: “You know who really gives kids a bad name? Posh and Becks.”). The punster Tim Vine remains a massive force for comic good (“I took part in the sun-tanning Olympics – I just got Bronze”) and they’re there, in a dark way, in the comedy of Jimmy Carr and Frankie Boyle, to name but two. Plus, unsurprisingly, in a world of 140-character brevity, one-liners are all over the social network universe. The great David Nobbs, author of the Reggie Perrin books, is a particular master of the tweeted line (“Last week I was in Sandwich. Not many people know that it’s twinned with the Italian town of Panini”) and there are many, many others.

Yet the one-liner is also an increasingly neglected aspect of comedy. Yes, there are great exponents in modern times, from Steven Wright (“What’s another word for thesaurus?”) to the late Mitch Hedberg (“I saw this wino, he was eating grapes. I was like, dude, you have to wait”), but as an art form its brilliance is arguably dimmed.

This week also saw the passing of the great American comic Phyllis Diller, who will always have a place in my heart for starring in a movie called Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number! Diller was one of the first female stand-ups, an acerbic role model for Joan Rivers, Roseanne and countless other comediennes, and a mistress of the one-liner (“You know you’re old if they’ve discontinued your blood type”). With her goes the last of a generation of smoky night-club comedy, lines dropped like bombs, followed by laughter rather than a drummer’s sardonic “boom-tish”.

It’s that boom-tish sound which for me sounded the death knell of one-liners in their prime, because it’s a distancing effect. It invites you to laugh not at the joke, but at the idea of laughing at a joke. It’s ironic, in other words, and irony isn’t always healthy.

Put it another way; no comic wants to tell a joke and be met by a wave of raised, eyebrows instead of laughter (I once worked on a sketch for Radio 4’s On the Hour, about a fictional humour magazine, and my title for it was the least mirth-inducing I could think of – The Wry Fellow.) One-liners demand that you enter the world of the comic and take the awful pun or slick observation they’re making at face value. Amazingly for such short things, they require your commitment.

Because, the opposing argument goes, people aren’t that funny in real life. When we are stopped at Customs, we don’t say, “I have nothing to declare but my genius,” because we don’t want to be arrested. If we really did, like Winston Churchill, tell someone that in the morning we would be sober but they would still be ugly, we’d be asked to leave the dinner party. Some people are funny in real life (Peter Cook, for example, was just as hilarious in conversation as when writing or working from a script) but most of us, when our conversation is written down, tend to spend a lot of time talking about petrol prices or early Mott the Hoople albums (or maybe, as the stand-ups say, that’s just me). So, the argument goes, if people say funny things, they’re not being real.

The struggle between realism and unrealism in comedy is a long-standing one. On the one hand, silly programmes like The Goon Show, Father Ted, The Young Ones and Monty Python had tenuous connections to reality. On the other, sitcoms like The Office and Curb Your Enthusiasm present a world rooted in observation and day-to-day frustration. Both have their merits, but the realistic model is on the increase (shows such as The Mighty Boosh and This is Jinsy are hardly realistic, but they’re so surreal that they exist as opposition to realistic comedy).

And it’s not just sitcoms. Stand-up comedians, particularly at Edinburgh, tend to favour one-person shows that are deeply, thoroughly autobiographical. At their best, these are about important emotional experiences from the comic’s life. At their worst, they’re lazy, reflexive discourses about their career in television.

This, too, can be funny, but the comedy fan, enduring yet another snapshot of reality, may reflect that people didn’t go to see Tommy Cooper read extracts from his diary, or listen to Eric Morecambe muse on the difficulties of working with BBC producers. They went for the flights of fancy and the near-madness of the worlds these comics created – worlds that are sometimes best conjured up in a brilliant one-liner.